Tropes around tech utopianism are attractive fictions that promise quick wins and deliver long-term pain, ultimately undermining our efforts at effective value storytelling (series recap, plus prior screeds against tech-fixated magical thinking here, here, and here)

A new bombshell lawsuit against a contract lifecycle management provider offers a stark reminder of the promise and peril of CLM—and therefore an unfortunate but instructive example of how tech-first solutioning can go terribly wrong.

Bad contracting processes have consequences. At the center of the complaint is a ~$5m contract for CLM services and tech. The plaintiff claim they terminated the contract early for alleged uncured breaches thereof and then mistakenly continued to make ~$1.7m in payments to defendant.

Isn’t it ironic (in the Alanis Morrissette sense of the word) that in a lawsuit centered around a disastrous effort to improve contract management a substantial percentage of the alleged damages are due to alleged failures in contract management.

The business value of better contracting is not in question. As discussed previously, a 20% improvement in contracting efficacy has, on average, 32x the business impact of cutting outside counsel spend by 20%. Tech has an important role to play. But tech should not be the star of the show, especially in the beginning.

When tech is not the primary problem (or the primary solution). The complaint begins its retelling in October 2019 when the defendant gave an in-person platform demonstration. In June 2020—seven months later “following a rigorous selection process”—the parties entered into the $5m contract only to terminate it in April 2021, ten months post execution. Suit was filed in November—more than two years after the demo (which is unlikely to have even been the beginning of this ill-fated journey).

Important for our purposes, the plaintiff specifically alleges only one tech-related misrepresentation giving rise to their claims (the ability to “apply a single contract amendment to multiple agreements simultaneously”). Beyond that, every issue raised in the complaint relates to the enormous amount of work required to properly implement CLM.

Characterized as inadequate in the complaint:

• Staffing
• Availability of key resources
• Status tracking
• Training
• Documentation
• Discovery
• Design
• Feedback
• Data mapping
• Data conversion
• Data migration
• Data validation
• Template harmonization
• Contract sorting
• Clause matching
• Implementation
• Integration

The tech is not the central grievance. The gravamen of the complaint is the absence of expertise: Continue Reading Tech-First Failures – Value Storytelling (#6)

Two massive barriers to good value storytelling (series recap):

1. It requires hard work, taking time we don’t have
2. Even if we have the time and do the work, our current chapter might prove unflattering

Herein, I focus on #2. Ego is often the enemy and, thus, we must frequently first edit the stories we tell ourselves.

I give short shrift to #1 only because it lends itself better to books, coursework and practice than a brief blog post (or even a long blog post).

In the beginning, there was the current state. We start by mapping existing processes, capturing meaningful data, and (eventually) using that data to craft a story (last post) that resonates with our business stakeholders.

Per usual, easier said than done. The rigor and effort required to overcome inertia consume finite resources (almost no one has strategic reserves of time and attention). Mapping and measuring is often labor intensive because we don’t just need to know who does what and how, but why. And not the superficial why but the root-cause why.

It is astounding how often we dig into long-established processes and the reasoning behind a particular step turns out to be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Vestigial activities are endemic, as are kludges and compromises born from expediency (the need for speed). We are awash in technical, process, and cultural debt.

The status quo, however, rarely bears any evidentiary burden whereas proposals to improve on the status quo are often subject to strictest levels of scrutiny. We need to get our story straight, including being prepared for one troubling angle of inquiry: how did you let it get so bad? Identifying an opportunity for improvement can be flipped on its head as an indictment that persists whether or not we secure the resources required to remedy the issue. Volunteering for additional accountability is not an appealing option.

Early on, our story is rarely a happy one (and that’s ok). As discussed last post, we often default to vague stories because we have no other choice. We lack the details, data, and insights to paint a compelling picture. Resource constraints are, as always, a primary culprit—which is why we must be selective in the stories we aim to tell well. But another blocker is the forgivable fear of what we might uncover.

The excusable ambition is to tell a story in which everything legal does is awesome—with even more awesomeness bound to result from earmarking additional resources for legal. But this narrative will usually ring false. Because it is not true. Which creates a conundrum. Maximizing throughput at current resourcing levels would, at first glance, seem foundational to a persuasive story of how incremental resources will be deployed to benefit the business—i.e., use what’ve you got wisely before asking for more.

Unfortunately, there is likely considerable waste embedded in our current operating model. Even if we prefer to believe our initial design decisions were impeccable (no) and our execution thereof flawless (also no), we are confronted with the harsh reality of entropy as the world moves faster than our department ever could. The endless pursuit of optimal requires regular recalibration. True transformation requires much, much more. But telling a story in which a pivot results in a positive outcome is almost invariably an admission that, at some point, our choices and behaviors were suboptimal.

We do not like to look bad. But we probably need to look bad before we can get good.

The first step is admitting imperfection. Take, for example, this fabulous case study from my friend Alex Hamilton’s must-read book on contracting, Sign Here (reprinted with permission, of course):

That’s four very different stories.

The common Why is “because the government said so.” This Why is not fun—money spent to preserve, rather than create, value in response to increased legal complexity. But, as Whys go, sufficiently clear and compelling. More intriguing are the divergent Hows.

The companies resemble one another, from a distance. Each company is partnering with the same New Law company to tackle the same problem. Each has sufficient rigor around process and metrics to the point of being able to identify specific bottlenecks. Yet, despite superficially similar levels of sophistication, there are material differences in outcomes.

The Department of Slow. By attempting to insert a provision, not required by the new legislation, to materially increase their counterparties’ potential liability, Dept B moved 4.5x slower than Dept D. This delay cuts right to the heart of the relationship between legal work and business outcomes and why divorcing legal considerations from business value can diminish the legal function’s standing with business stakeholders.

(h/t Alex Su)

According to Gartner, when legal guidance is too conservative, business decision makers are:

• 2.5 times more likely to forgo business opportunities that legal recommendations have made less attractive
• 2.5 times more likely to suffer delays in capturing opportunities as they work through legal guidance and requirements
• 4.25 times more likely to scale down the scope of opportunities

What lawyers consider “conservative” can put a company into an “aggressive” posture vis-à-vis counterparties with whom they are trying to do actual business. Consider this entire thread  about a lawyer costing an individual client millions of dollars by taking maximalist negotiating positions in a genuine effort to protect the client’s interests.

With the thread in mind, the questions prompted by the case study include: was the attempt to contractually increase the other side’s overall liability a net positive to the business? Did it merit the increase in cycle times, and the attention costs associated therewith? Was the resulting friction in the commercial relationship worth it?

I don’t know.

I can’t know. The answers are context dependent. Maybe an inciting incident or leadership change altered the business’s risk tolerance and this repapering exercise presented an opportunity to redress their risk profile. Not my circus, not my elephants.

Facts are annoying that way. So in a display of internet courage, I will hazard a guess that this business’s raison d’etre is not to maximize its counterparty’s potential liability. Just as I am fairly confident the business’s primary objective is not to minimize its own liability (winding down operations would be the surest route to unlock this dubious achievement).

From personal experience, telling a businessperson “well, there’s a risk” is essentially a content-free statement. Every business decision, every action and inaction, balances a variety of enterprise risks, only some of which are legal in nature. Attempting to eliminate risk, or minimize risk in a way that ignores net business impact, is one way the legal function becomes labeled the Department of No and the Department of Slow, with the primary complaint among our stakeholders being that in-house lawyers “don’t understand my business.”

It remains incumbent on the legal function to identify legal risks and characterize those risks properly. We need to intelligibly translate legal risk into potential business impact (probability, frequency, severity). Indeed, the dream is to price risk properly and integrate it directly into the business calculus. Which is another way of saying, our role includes helping to advise the business on taking smart risks.

Inevitably, we will still have to tell the business that which they would rather not hear—like new privacy legislation requires us to update many existing contracts. But we will find a much more receptive audience if we have consistently demonstrated we are allies invested in helping the business make money.

A credible (rather than incredible) bearer of bad news. The legal department needing more resources will be among the unpalatable truths that almost no one will be eager to accept.

Informing the business that legal has been wasting money for years will not endear us to our audience in the right way—savings-centric narratives are a dead-end path of least resistance that reinforce the attractive fiction that the company should be spending less on legal. On the other end of the spectrum, pretending like legal is eternally perched at the apex of resource optimization and operational excellence is (likely) transparently laughable.

The middle road is to do the best we can to optimize the resources we have while also asking for the resources we need. Pick the low-hanging fruit (i.e., patent, preventable waste) identified in the process mapping/measurement exercise and present the resulting improvements to support the case for more resources to move beyond incrementalism. In the case-study example, reform the delay-inducing contract language and then cite the already improved cycle times in the petition for (i) the resources and (ii) cross-functional collaboration necessary to address the delays caused by slow approvals and signatures, the topic to which we will return next post.

I know. I remain a citizen of good standing in Obvioustown. But the middle path is rarely chosen because it requires being bold (asking for more money) while also being prepared (putting in the work to get the story straight), including being prepared to recognize where we are falling short (looking less than perfect). Most departments are situated near one of the extremes—too shy to ask for the resources we need (no value stories to tell) or too quick to do so without any meaningful effort to get our house in order (our stories are vague and incredible).

Some level of humility is an important part of credibility. But not too much. Technical, process, and cultural debt are not unique to legal. The law department’s ways of working are unlikely to be the most inexplicable part of the collective goat rodeo. It often seems like the business makes money in spite of itself. Humility paired with competence and tangible progress towards improved business outcomes should be enough to convince persuadable stakeholders that additional resources will be put to good use.

Likewise, we should not apologize that increasing legal complexity drives up the costs of doing business. That’s the problem we’re responsible for addressing, not responsible for creating. Instead, we need to clearly articulate the business value at stake in a manner that reflects our roles as allies in driving superior business outcomes, including advising the business on taking smart risks. This does not guarantee we will secure the requisite resources (expect legal to still be chronically underfunded) but it does improve our chances substantially as we change perceptions about being the Department of Slow/No.

Start with Why. Value storytelling is essential (series summarized here). But, as storytellers, we’re not experimenting with the form. We should tell simple, compelling stories with no mystery as to the What, How, and Why.

What is outputs. How is inputs/process. Why is purpose, outcomes, and value.

What, How, and Why all matter. But, for our business audience, legal’s What and How are inherently uninteresting. Always start with their Why.

Why is the subject of the previous post. Business value is the one true Why. The call to action. The hook. The propulsive force. But the framing of Why is context dependent. The way we talk about business value will often need to be calibrated to our subject matter and our target audience—identifying our target audience and understanding what messaging resonates with them is quintessential to mastering our own context.

The stories we tell must cohere with the stories our audience tells themselves about their own starring role in the business’s journey. We must present ourselves as allies in the same cause. Which we are. This sense of shared purpose is most crucial when we are engaged in productive disagreement and accountable for persuading our allies of unpalatable truths—whether seeking to rejigger their perspective on value preservation (e.g., refining their legal-risk/business-reward calculus) or recommending that finite resources be allocated to the legal function despite the very real opportunity costs. Continue Reading Start with Why – Value Storytelling (#4)

SERIES TO DATE

Lawyers Lagging Behind (#0)

Maybe, Don’t Be MacGyver (#1)

The Savings Trap (#2)

Defining Business Value (#3)

Start with Why (#4)

The Dept of Slow & No (#5)

Tech-First Failures (#6)

SUMMARY

Legal expertise is valuable to the enterprise. Demand is on steep upward trajectory. Budgets are failing to keep pace. We must optimize resource allocation and innovate—enhance productivity through process and tech. But, while innovation and optimization are key elements in our value story, we are still likely to need more money for the legal function to drive better business outcomes at scale and pace. Service levels are inextricably tied to resource levels—including the resources required to invest in innovation and optimization.

It is, literally, our job to ensure the legal aspects of business needs are met. Thus, it is also our job to secure sufficient resources for the legal function. Obtaining finite resources inside an enterprise carries substantial opportunity costs (other value the business could pursue with the same money) and therefore requires expert value storytelling, a learned skill in which few legal professionals are practiced.

The business defines “value.” Yet the number one complaint among the legal function’s business stakeholders is in-house lawyers “don’t understand my business.” Understanding—mastering our own context—is essential. We should be capable of framing our ask for incremental resources in the language and metrics of the business. Centering the creation, and preservation, of business value in our narrative is the core of value storytelling.

Business value is context-dependent, not unknowable. Conversations around the business value of, say, accelerating speed-to-revenue demand a different framing, and often has a different audience, than conversations around the business value of complying with new privacy regulations. We should know our audience and develop the attendant abilities to calibrate messaging for maximum resonance with specific sets of business stakeholders.

Being aligned with the business, however, does not spare us from making hard choices and engaging in hard conversations as to what constitutes value. Though it pains our service-loving souls, it incumbent upon us to prioritize activities by business impact and artfully say “no” when asked to handle deprioritized work. We should, however, capitalize on each “no” as an opportunity to build our story that additional legal resources are required to address unmet business needs.

Yet, instead of a more-with-more value proposition, we too often default to savings-centric tropes valorizing more-with-less heroics reliant on extraordinary effort and improvisational ingenuity to bridge resource gaps (excess MacGyverism). Stories about savings are easy because they are counterproductive—reinforcing the attractive fiction that the business can, and should, spend less on legal. Good value storytelling is anything but easy for the same reason it is necessary—the hallmark of successful advocacy is not a penchant for combative argumentation but, rather, our ability to persuade those who need persuading.

We are similarly inclined towards the attractive fiction of tech-first solutioning. It would be convenient if tech were the solution to every problem. But value storytelling is persuasive nonfiction and is therefore required to survive contact with reality. In reality, we often need to pay down considerable process and cultural debt to lay the groundwork for  necessary tech enablement.

Laying the groundwork starts with Why but needs to be supplemented with a compelling and coherent vision as to How business value should be delivered. We need an articulable, actionable approach that resonates with our business stakeholders. Target operating models. Technology roadmaps. Metrics. We have to be able to move upstream to address the business drivers of legal workloads, presenting a systems-oriented view of how legal supports better business outcomes. Doing this well requires work sorting because we are bandwidth constrained. We can only tackle so many projects, let alone programs, at once.

In addition to limited bandwidth, we are constrained by a fear of looking bad and a myopic perspective on risk. Legal is often labeled the Department of Slow or the Department of No, which undermines our value storytelling. We need to shift these perspectives among our stakeholders, in part, by understanding when and where they are grounded in some level of truth—candid self-assessments of being bottlenecks because of (i) bad processes or (ii) an acute focus on legal risk that ignores net business impact. This candor extends to our business case: fix what we can, admit where we are falling short, and request the resources we need to serve the business better.

Business value is business-centric. Law departments frequently ask me about metrics. My response is not nearly as definitive as they desire. I recommend they start with the customer—incorporating the metrics the business is already using and then proceeding accordingly to develop the complementary, internal (to the law department) metrics necessary to manage the department in supporting business objectives.

Talk to most (not all) law departments, you find the inverse. Most law department metrics are law-department centric, full stop. Most track their spend, consistent with a savings-centric narrative, the pitfalls of which I discussed last post. Spend with law firms. Spend v. budget. Internal v. external spend. Necessary. Fine. Limited.

You can also find excellent content online on how a more sophisticated law department can, and should, measure itself. Matter volume. Matter velocity. Cycle times. Better. Rare. Still law-department-centric.

To ground the conversation, we require some metrics on metrics. The most common law department metric is Total Spend By Law Firm, in use at 90% of law departments. No other metric cracks 60%. Cycle Time, by contrast, is near the bottom, tracked by only 16% of law departments. Legal Spend To Revenue is in the middle of the distribution at 29% penetration.

Critically, excepting diversity, these metrics are essentially meaningless from a business perspective. The CEO cares as little about how many matters the law department handles as they do about how many tickets the IT help desk closes, despite the fact both are essential to running the business. These are useful measures for managing workload within a specific function but irrelevant for managing the business—unless and until they are translated into actual business impact (i.e., value storytelling). Continue Reading Defining Business Value – Value Storytelling (#3)